In his new memoir and writing guide Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, novelist Harlan Coben writes that there are three things that “make a writer”:

The first is Inspiration…. You have to be inspired to write. You have to want to tell a story. You have to feel like you have something to say….

The second is Perspiration.… You have to do the grunt work of writing. You have to write. Really write. Just so we are clear: Only writing counts as writing….

[The] most important of the three, the one that separates the wannabes from the achievers, the unpublished from the published, the quitter from the finisher, is Desperation.

This formula sounds so easy, doesn’t it? And it resonates with me.

Yes, I think — all I need to do to succeed as a writer is to (1) feel regularly inspired around writing (2) actually write so much that I’m sweating over my writing and (3) desperately desire to make it work, and just to do it at all. That sounds pretty easy!

But is it?

I do feel inspired around writing, I think, I write every day! But I don’t focus enough to produce even a newsletter to share at this point, much less a novella or a nonfiction book.

I write, but not to the point of perspiration. I blog each morning here. I don’t break a metaphorical sweat doing it.

Yesterday I sweated at the gym. I did 20 minutes of a high-intensity interval training stair climber program. That didn’t make me sweat, but it got my heart rate up to 150 beats per minute. Then I got on my favorite exercise bike, the one that has rides with resistance that goes up and down to mimic hills and valleys. I was glad I’d brought a little towel with me for that one. I went hard up the hills and upped the gear to 18 or 20 on the downslopes.

On that last factor — desperation — the one Coben says is most important, he jokes that his desperation arises because “I am not fit to do anything else. Like hold a real job.” He writes:

I’m not good at much else. I have no marketable skill other than telling a story. I’m forgetful, disorganized, lethargic, unfocused, lazy. I couldn’t keep a real job. More than that, I don’t want a real job. I fear the very idea, and that fear, that fear that if I don’t write I’d have to get a real job—shiver—gets me back in the writing chair.

I can relate to this. I thought when I left my corporate technology job in April of 2024 that I’d take a bit of time off and then return to the workforce. But now I feel like I will never go back. I can’t. I’m unemployable at this point! I couldn’t imagine leaving my flexible lifestyle to do someone else’s bidding. I don’t want to work eight or more hours a day. Like Coben, I don’t want a real job!

So writing and portfolio management it is (with some painting thrown in too).

Fortunately, I don’t really need a real job. But I do feel desperate to prove myself as a writer. Long ago I had a book published but it wasn’t a book I wanted to write, or one I felt motivated to promote. I wrote it on a quick schedule and due to political machinations, it didn’t end up being my book alone. I always thought I’d write a book that I did feel proud of someday.

Maybe that day is coming soon.

Coben adds that it’s not just desperation around making a living that leads someone to write or otherwise create:

[Desperation] is that part of you that simply has to be a writer. You have to tell your story. You have to write things down. I gave the cute, self-deprecating answer, now here’s the overly earnest one. You are desperate to create. You are desperate to write or paint or build or compose. You are desperate because—and here I may go too far—you don’t want to live a life without it.

I do feel that kind of desperation. I can’t not write. I get up every morning happy that the first thing I’m going to do — after feeding the dogs and cats and making my bed — is write a blog post here.

I feel it around artmaking too. I’m always getting ideas for art pieces to make. Or I’m inspired by a call for entry. Yesterday I went to Goodwill to get ideas for a small piece I’m preparing for a community exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. I came home with some new thoughts and spent time experimenting with them at home, with real materials.

Coben’s formula feels simple, but it’s not, because there’s so much complexity underneath each of the three factors. With inspiration, I get scattered by too much of it. With perspiration, I’m probably not sweating enough. With desperation, I need to harness it. What am I desperate about with my writing? Simply to do it? To build an audience? To express myself authentically?

I imagine I’m going to be coming back to these questions again and again as I figure out what’s next for me as a writer.

My parents, in their eighties, each live in a senior living place, my dad with his partner Hilde and my mother on her own, since her second husband passed away a couple years ago.

Their choices give me a peek into what my choices might look like later, should I choose to leave my house.

My dad and his partner live in an upscale multi-building retirement community that requires a buy-in — a large sum that is 90% refundable when they leave. It has multiple restaurants, an on-site rehab facility, and services like physical therapy right on site. It is a “continuing care retirement community” with assisted living, skilled nursing, and memory care units available. My mother lives in a one-building mid-rise (eight floors) with one dining room. It has assisted living but no memory care or skilled nursing. My mother pays just a monthly fee. No buy-in was required. My dad and Hilde pay a large monthly fee in addition to the buy-in that serves as both rent and payment for services like dining.

My mother told me that many of her friends, especially those from back in our country club days, are on a waiting list for a community similar to the one my dad lives in that is the place to be as you age, for that set.

It struck me that even as you age, you don’t give up on the search for prestige and comfort. +

I’m familiar now with both options — the posh multi-building community requiring a buy-in and the more modest (though still very nice) single building setting that only requires a monthly fee.

Personally, I’d probably look to the one-building community. My mother scored one of the best apartments in her building: a unit on the eighth floor with a bay window featuring a mountain view. My dad’s unit is spacious and lovely, it’s true, and the food at the various restaurants is fantastic, relatively speaking, but personally I wouldn’t want to do the buy-in or pay the high monthly fees (much higher than my mom’s monthly fee despite the buy-in).

An alternative, of course, would be aging in place. My house features a first-floor main suite, which makes that a more feasible option. But maintaining a house is a lot of work. I’m not even sure I want to keep that up right now!

However, I still have another era left in me: the era of being a grandmother. I hope very much that happens for me (or should I say, for at least one of my children, because it’s really not about me, is it?)

When my sisters children were young, and mine were adolescents, my mother and her husband had a large house with lots of bedrooms. My sisters would come in town over Christmas with their children and stay there.

I can imagine providing that kind of hospitality for my own grandchildren in the future. So I may have twenty years of homeownership in my future. By then I’ll be 78, a good age to think about moving into a senior living place.

It could be that by then I’m completely addled and need memory care. However, I plan to get my cognitive function tested regularly, and if I get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I’ll be making plans to fly to Switzerland before it gets too advanced. I do understand why most people who become demented just accept a long multi-year decline as part of what life might offer, and it might end up what I face too. But I think it’s a huge shame we don’t have a better way of dealing with it than the dark landscape of memory care.

[Metaphor] is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen, Metaphors We Live By

Lakoff and Johnsen use the metaphorical concept argument is war as an example of how our thought and our speech is organized by metaphor:

[We] don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and defend our own…. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument—attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. It is in this sense that the argument is war metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.

Because so much of our thought and speech is organized metaphorically, we can change our way of meeting the world by changing the metaphors we rely upon.

In my experience, changing metaphors is a more sure way to feeling better and making better decisions than trying to change sets of thoughts themselves, as you might with the popular counseling technique cognitive behavioral therapy.

The brunch

I went to brunch with my father, his partner, and her son yesterday. Afterward I felt that maybe I had been abrasive and awkward, introducing conversational subjects that went nowhere and seemed in retrospect to be inappropriate.

My initial judgments of myself were metaphorical in nature. Awkward derives from a word meaning “turned the wrong way” from the 1500s. Abrasive, of course, means something capable of roughly scraping on something else, like a piece of sandpaper.

What metaphors might I use instead to reframe the situation? ChatGPT suggested a couple I liked:

• The brunch table was an underpowered circuit and I was supplying more voltage than the room could comfortably absorb
• I was trying to kindle a conversation that didn’t readily catch fire
• I brought more energy than the gathering could easily metabolize

None of these metaphors absolve me of responsibility — each suggests I was doing something that didn’t really work (there’s another metaphor) because I wasn’t reading the room (another metaphor). But it gets away from describing me as an unpleasant person and focuses more on a situation that was difficult, for me, if not for anyone else.

CBT would have me go from “I was awkward and abrasive” to “I was just trying to make conversation in a setting where it was difficult.” Metaphors make a bridge to the new conceptual way of understanding the situation.

ACT and metaphors

Steven Hayes’ Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) psychotherapeutic approach is based on the idea that we create problems for ourselves because of our mental flexibility that allows us to link any two things together based on context. He calls the foundation of his approach Relational Frame Theory. This theory says that humans create bidirectional links between things. A metaphor is just such a link. If I think, “I was abrasive,” I’m creating a thought link between my self and the physical quality of being so rough you can scratch things up.

Among its various practices, the ACT approach promotes the use of flexible metaphors for loosening up the thought networks that keep us feeling bad and avoiding doing the things we really want to do. For example, some ACT therapists suggest you observe your thoughts like they are leaves floating on a stream, moving by. This helps you detach from those thoughts and see them as coming and going, not as some sort of rock-hard truth. Another metaphor is the idea that you are driving a bus, and there are all sorts of creatures on it, yelling things at you, like where you should turn or warning you of some upcoming hazard. The creatures are your thoughts, but you just ignore them and drive the route you’re supposed to drive.

Life metaphors

I’ve noticed that some of the philosophical ideas I like best are metaphorical in nature:

• Life as literature
• Experiencing a shipwreck and then having to construct a new boat from the debris
• The inner master and slave of the achievement society
• The machinery of life

The power of metaphors is in how they highlight certain aspects of a situation while downplaying others, which can be helpful or harmful.

Lakoff and Johnsen write:

The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another (e.g., comprehending an aspect of arguing in terms of battle) will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept (e.g., the battling aspects of arguing), a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent’s position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity, in an effort at mutual understanding. But when we are preoccupied with the battle aspects, we often lose sight of the cooperative aspects.

In many situation in life, especially those that bring anxiety or sadness or other upset, it’s useful to ask yourself: What metaphor am I operating under? And Is there another metaphor I might take on that would be more helpful for me?

There is much more to say about metaphors, but I will stop here for now. I’m already finding power in it, by reframing yesterday’s brunch experience not by retelling exactly what was happening, but by experimenting with different symbolic (i.e., metaphorical) representations of the experience.

Today, metaphors of sticking to something. Metaphors help us make sense of life, and the more I make myself aware of the metaphors I’m relying upon at a point in time, the more I can make my life the life I want.

Yesterday, I shared a quote from Wendell Berry, in which he offered coherence as something people might aspire toward:

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enteres into the communion of all creatures.

That got me thinking about the metaphor of coherence for describing a person’s approach the world, or their essence, or their life.

The word coherent comes from Latin roots meatning “to stick together.” The root com- means “together” and haerere means “to stick or adhere.” It describes something physical in the world — things sticking together. Coherence means when different parts or ideas fit together in a logical, natural, and consistent way.

Adherence is another kind of sticking together. A person showing adherence is following something outside themselves — rules or norms for example. When I maintain my lawn as lush and green as possible I’m adhering to modern-day suburban landscaping expectations.

Both adherence and coherence derive from the Latin word haerere meaning to stick or to cling. But adherence uses the prefix ad- meaning to or toward and coherence uses com- or co- meaning together or with. Adherence means to stick to something else. Coherence means to stick together as a whole.

Coherence and adherence are strictly metaphorical. Their physical counterparts are adhesion and cohesion. Adhesion means one kind of thing sticking to another thing: water droplets sticking to a window pane. Cohesion means one kind of thing sticking to itself: water droplets sticking to each other can form a puddle.

In living a life

In your life, should you seek coherence or adherence? It depends, of course. Many people might find themselves leaning towards adherence when they are young: first in school, you have to comply with various rules and expectations to earn degrees; later as a young adult you want to show yourself to be a responsible member of society, getting a job, perhaps marrying, maybe having children.

It’s at midlife and later that coherence might become more important. That’s not to say that adolescents and young adults don’t care about being at one with themselves — they do — some more than others. For me, adherence came first and now, at what I have to acknowledge is less midlife than early late life, I’m seeking coherence.

in art

As an artist, coherence is more important than adherence. But is that entirely true? An artist focused on producing art that sells might have to make her art adhere to current market expectations and demands. An artist focused, instead, on producing art that matters somehow might have to adhere to the current artistic discourse. An artist focused on developing her own unique sort of art will be looking for coherence. Of course the first two types of artists can’t dispense with coherence entirely. An artist who seeks to create popular, marketable art will do best if she has a signature style — a coherence to her work. And similarly for an artist who seeks to make a mark on the art world. She absolutely needs to demonstrate some coherence of vision.

In a single piece of art, there must be coherence for it to be good art no matter whether the purpose is to sell it, to show it, or to express one’s inner self.

Art demands coherence.

Whether it demands adherence to something external depends upon what the artist intends for it.

choosing metaphors deliberately

I’m finding it useful to be deliberate about what metaphors I try to live by at different times. This idea of cohesion and coherence makes me feel like a retreat from the world — a retreat from trying to stick to things that other people or institutions have created or have developed through some process of cultural evolution — is the right move for me right now.

In his book of essays What Are People For? novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, who passed away last week, writes:

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

[via The Marginalian]

It’s a bit paradoxical, that one must retreat from contact with others to make one’s self more fully available for communion with others.

I find myself retreating more and more from the world into solitude, but not because I don’t want to connect with other people, because I want to create a foundation for more subtle and meaningful connection. Like George Bernard Shaw, I need to labor on my own for some time, for possibly a very long time (he did it for eight years!)

The world tells you right now: if you want to be a writer, you need to do it out loud. You need to build an audience, with a newsletter perhaps, and with a regular cadence of published, polished writing. If you go with Substack, you need to engage with potential readers through their Notes feed.

But I want to do it Shaw-style. Maybe I want to go into hiding for eight years — I’m already more than two years in — and write multiple books, none of which might ever be published.

The world also tells you: You need to be coupled up, ideally married. You need to have a rich social life. You need to workout three to five times a week for 45 minutes each time. If you’re retired, you better have at least five million dollars on hand, better yet ten.

I want to live my life my way. And I feel called towards a period of solitude that is deliberately chosen and fully enjoyed.

And about that grass

My grass lawn feels oppressive to me right now, another example of the demands that society makes and I have internalized.

I live in a golf course community so you might imagine the people who live here are, for the most part, very dedicated to creating beautiful blue grass lawns. Much of my front yard is a cottagey garden, but I have a bit of grass, both in the front and in between the neighbor’s house and mine.

I had an old tree removed from the side lawn and now there is a bare spot. The bare spot made me think, “maybe that could become a flower bed.” And so I’m pondering moving some of the irises I have over there.

This morning I woke up unsure though. I thought, “maybe I should just fix the bare spot next spring with seed or sod.” I thought, “a flower bed on half of that area might look silly.” I can only change half of it over into a flower bed because the other half belongs to my neighbors, and they are dedicated to grass.

But perhaps I ought to go forward with the flower bed because it’s symbolically the right direction for me. A flower bed of irises, day lilies, and catmint is much more authentically me than more grass. And the opportunity to make it happen myself is very one-in-herself.

So this week, one of my projects is to continue digging up the irises (which need to be dug up, divided, and replanted regardless), to plant some in the bare spot, and possibly, to put black tarp over the grass that I intend to remove. That will help it die over the winter and make it, I hope, easy to remove in spring.

Meanwhile

This week I’ll be executing Week Two of my four-week transition towards my full Flow Allocation porfolio program for the IRA account that I recently took over from my asset manager. I’m also going to start moving two other accounts towards that approach: my Roth IRA and another small traditional IRA I have. That will leave only my income account for options wheeling.

On Thursday, I’m dropping off my book assemblage at the University of Denver for the WCACO (Un)Altered Books show. And Wednesday evening I’ll be joining the Zoom call for the WCACO exhibitions committee.

Aside from those activities, I’m going to see how I can intensify my writing activities by letting go of the persistent feeling that I need to share and publish more, versus working on book manuscripts just for myself and my sense of coherence right now.

If I let go of the drive to publish, for example on my own substack newsletter, will that help me go deeper, learn more, generate better ideas? That’s the hope.

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreoever, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

I find myself using metaphors in my thought and expression regularly, without being aware I’m doing so.

After I left my corporate technology job in April of 2024, I started a blog, The Reinvention Project. Reinvention is a metaphor for how to understand — and drive — changes in a life.

Reinvention implies the existence of a product, a business, an institution, one that needs to be evaluated and then remade. Using reinvention for what I intended to do with my life said that something about it was no longer suitable or appropriate, that I needed to conceive a replacement, and that I am responsible for creating a replacement that “works” in some sense. It suggested that eventually there should be a recognizable and dare I say legible (to use another metaphor) new version to present to the outside world.

The language of reinvention brought the corporate world’s expectations into the life I wanted to build after.

But there are other metaphors I might use to describe what happens next:

• I could be on an ocean journey to a far-off land that I’ve never visited before
• I could be cultivating the garden of my life, preparing the soil, planting seeds, watering the ground, deadheading old blooms, picking off japanese beetles, and enjoying the flowers that resulted, briefly, before drying out and dying.
• I could be painting over the canvas of my life, creating a palimpsest of what came before and what’s beautiful now
• I could be writing the next chapter of my life as story, showing how my character continues to evolve and meet new challenges

In thinking and communicating about lives, we often default to metaphors that may or may not serve us. “I’m falling behind” implies you are in a race or competition with other people. “I’m not where I should be” suggests that life is some sort of scheduled tour. “I have too much baggage,” says that life is a burden to carry. “Life has cheated me” says that life is like a person who has deliberately made my life worse. “I’ll take my chances” means that life is a gambling game.

More explicitly choosing the metaphors you rely upon to understand your life and guide your thoughts and action can help you feel better, and live life the way you want to, not just by default.

One of my favorite metaphors right now for making sense of my life and helping me decide “what next” is the idea of my life as a work of great literature. What implications does this have? It says that struggle and challenges are necessary for living a good life, not something to be avoided or wished away. It suggests that as I meet these struggles I can evolve and change, in interesting ways. It says that a good life is made up of the joyous and the terrible, not simply the happy and the successful. It says that other “characters” in my life are fully themselves and have their own stories playing out (because a good work of literature fully fleshes out many characters, not just the protagonist).

Whatever metaphor you’re operating under right now, it’s useful to acknowledge it to yourself. It may be helping you but it also may be limiting you, keeping you from seeing opportunities that are might surface if you tried a different one.

In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes of the labor that must precede the sharing of true artistic gifts using the shoemaker and the elves as a guiding parable:

Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night—a talent has appeared, but it’s naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before he emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. “I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go.” He was twenty. “In March, 1876, I broke loose,” he says. He left family, friends, business, and Ireland. He spent about eight years in absentia, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life—and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them).

Hyde shares comments from Erik Erikson on Shaw:

Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.

This need not happen only when you are a young woman, or a young man. I am doing it now.

I’m not eliminating nutrition but what does he mean by that anyway? Perhaps too much exposure to other people’s ideas and creations?

Hyde continues:

For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

He says “the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time” but the untalented will as well. Anyway, the point of the retreat to those Bohemias is to cultivate the talent, to develop it, to call it forth.

[It] is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift.

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

Hyde describes how a person is transformed by the gift of art:

We could speak of artists’ lives and artists’ creations in a similar fashion. Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself.

I was converted to art by the art of my grandmother, and by her example of how to live a creative life.

But the transformative power of art when it is gifted isn’t immediate, writes Hyde:

[A] transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along.

And:

Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreoever, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms.

Hyde uses the example of the gift of how to become sober, given through Alcoholics Anonymous’ tenets and meetings:

AA has “twelve steps to recovery,” which more or less summarize the program. The twelfth step is an act of gratitude: recovered alcoholics help other alcoholics when called upon to do so. It is a step in which the gift is passed along, so it is right that it should be the final one. In AA they speak of people who are “two-steppers”—that is, people who take Step One (accepting they are an alcoholic) and then jump directly to Step Twelve (helping others) without the in-between steps where the labor lies. They try to pass along something they themselves have not yet received.

In what way is a gift of art like a twelve-step sobriety program?

My grandmother identified as an artist, like someone who goes to AA may come to identify as an alcoholic. She showed me by example how to live as an artist, not a professional artist, but as someone whose art infused her life and flowed out and infused other people’s lives. Similarly, in AA, people who attend meetings don’t just learn by being explicitly taught. Instead, they learn through hearing stories and practices that other people share: “here’s what I did after I started drinking again to return to sobriety,” “here’s what I did when I faced grief and wanted to turn to drinking but found an alternative,” and so forth.

When I first started painting abstracts, I learned from other artists. I followed tutorials from Adele Sypesteyn and KR Moehr. I bought books created by abstract art painters and followed their instructions, read their tips.

At some point, I felt ready to share my paintings with the world. I felt ready to pass the gift along. I know that it was passed to other people; they have told me so.

This is a curious power of being an artist. Not the power to create something so that someone might hang it on their wall: the power to create something so that another might be motivated to create too.

I’ve recently taken over control of my IRA from an asset manager. Instead of using a diversified buy-and-hold portfolio like the asset manager recommended, I’m adding simple timing rules so as to reduce volatility and drawdown size.

I’m following Meb Faber’s quantitative approach to tactical asset allocation expanded with weekly tranche-based entries and exits as described in this paper by Gabriel, Pagani, and Zaratiini.

Yesterday, I began a transition to the new approach. With the help of Codex, I’ve built a (local) web application that I can use each week for four weeks to gradually sell out of non-preferred ETFs and move into preferred ETFs, where the signals tell me to be invested, or into cash, if the signals indicate a defensive stance.

My basic allocation has 17 asset sleeves, each with a preferred ETF. If, as of the day before a buy/sell day, the preferred ETF is above the 200-day MA, I stay invested, or move one 25% tranche to invested from defensive, if it was defensive at the last update for that tranche. If the preferred ETF is below the 200-day MA, I either stay out of the ETF and in a money market fund, or, if invested at the last tranche update, I move that 25% tranche out.

Right now, all the bond sleeves as well as international real estate and gold are defensive. Meanwhile everything else is invested.

Over four weeks, I will move to a state where, for each asset sleeve, it is divided into four tranches, and each tranche is invested in the ETF or sitting in the money market fund depending on what happened four weeks ago for that tranche.

The need for an application to help me

It would be difficult to do this without the web app I’ve built, but not impossible. I could use spreadsheets to tell me how to gradually move out of non-preferred ETFs while establishing positions, per timing signals, in the preferred ETFs.

Right now I have more than 30 positions I’m juggling, legacies from the portfolio I held before I handed it off to the asset manager and positions he established as well.

The first rebalancing took me about an hour and a half yesterday. The web app doesn’t submit trades itself — only recommends them. Then I enter them manually into Schwab.

When will I know whether this was a good idea or not? Years later. Investment approaches only prove their worth on that kind of timeframe.

But one thing’s for sure: this is more emotionally satisfying than working with an asset manager.

Trump-appointed United States Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned yesterday. Reportedly, the primary reason for his resignation was defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s blocking of Driscoll’s efforts to modernize and transform the army.

In May 2025, Driscoll had launched a reform agenda, the Army Transformation Initiative, informed in part by Ukraine’s experience with rapidly innovating new technologies such as drone warfare as they resisted Russia’s invasion.

In October, Hegseth summoned senior officers from around the world to emphasize physical prowess and appearance standards, while modern warfare experts said future wars will “depend more on cutting-edge technology, precision strikes and AI.”

Driscoll pushed back on Hegseth’s folly:

We will win with silicon and software and not our soldiers’ bodies… No one can predict the next war, but we cannot wait, we cannot fucking wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield.

Recently, an Army unit based in Europe that was specializing in drone warfare was ordered by the Army’s acting chief of staff to return to a focus on airborne infantry warfare. Acting Chief of Staff General Christopher LaNeve, who gave the order to switch from drone to infantry focus, took over after Hegseth ousted General Randy George from the Army Chief of Staff post in April.

In his book How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy argues that Rome gradually squandered its institutional capabilities by turning inward and engaging in civil warfare rather than attending to the health of the empire. From the book’s description:

Ultimately, this is the story of how an empire without a serious rival rotted from within, its rulers and institutions putting short-term ambition and personal survival over the wider good of the state.

Right now, we have a U.S. presidential administration focused on sowing internal divisions (a president who calls the opposition party “Dumocrats”), on physical fitness instead of technological readiness, and on building a ballroom.

The Western Roman empire lasted more than 500 years, and the Eastern (Byzantine) based on Constantinople more than 1500.

The current American empire dates back to just after World War II, less than a century ago.

Will we make it 500 years? Seems unlikely, as the country devolves into incompetence and internal rancor.